More than 100 demonstrators from Canada's Druze community gathered on Parliament Hill on Friday afternoon, asking for the government to intervene in an unfolding humanitarian crisis in Syria where hundreds have already been killed.

Syria should not be allowed back into the international community unless it is able to uphold protections for the Druze and its other minority groups, Israel has said.

"Now is the time for the Syrian government to turn their words into real actions if they want to maintain legitimacy: restore order, protect all of its citizens," Hamadeh says

Members of Syria's Druze community are searching for loved ones and counting their dead after days of clashes in a southern province that left bloodied bodies of civilians on the streets and homes loo

The White House is attributing the outbreak of violence in the Middle East between the Syrian government and Israel to a "misunderstanding" over ethnic grudges.

Israeli officials react to the ongoing violence in Syria's Sweida between regime forces and the local Druze community. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged Israeli Druze citizens not to cross the border amid ongoing clashes in Sweida in southern Syria on Wednesday afternoon.

Hundreds of Druze from Israel pushed across the border in solidarity with their Syrian cousins they feared were under attack. Many then met relatives they had never seen before.

The Druze religious sect, enmeshed in an outbreak of tit-for-tat violence in Syria, began roughly 1,000 years ago as an offshoot of Ismailism, a branch of Shiite Islam.